Hand out money and free beers 
Would you mind sharing this function?
This could be very useful in cases where the community is not just online… but also a real community… i.e… local volunteer organizations where everyone knows everyone in real life. In that case… it may make sense for everyone to be a friend of everyone. I love that BuddyPress shows you activity for all members (not just friends… like twitter)… but really dislike the fact that you can’t send out group invites to non-friends. In the example above (a real community where everyone knows everyone in real life)… it makes sense to be able to invite anyone.
Why not use DJPaul’s Welcome Pack and select everybody as friends?
Two reasons:
1) With Paul’s plugin, you manually select which members should become friends. It doesn’t friend everyone automatically. So your list of which members should become friends would never be up to date (plus I’d have to check off a couple hundred check boxes).
2) The Welcome pack simply makes friend requests. You still have to rely on the new member to accept the request. And you can’t rely on people to do that. Trust me 
What I really need is a way to automatically make every single member an automatically confirmed friend of every other member.
You’re right about reason #1.
Re: reason #2, it shouldn’t make friend requests, it should automatically sign you up as a friend. At least that’s the case on the older version of Welcome Pack working with BP 1.0.3.
We use this feature much like the way Tom from MySpace is friends with everyone. Try the latest version of Welcome Pack for BP 1.1+.
I’m using the latest version on BP 1.2-bleeding. In my experience, the new user still has to confirm you. Reason #1 is still a problem however. The Welcome Pack is great… but it’s not really meant to do what I’m proposing. Might be able to hack it to do what I want however.
We don’t use the friends feature at all and that works fine. It’s a small community and we’ve got no need for it at the moment.
Welcome Pack did originally auto-accept Friend invites but someone made the suggestion that letting users respond to the notification also taught them how to use the site. I changed it a few versions back.
Devil’s advocate: if you friend everyone with everyone automatically, what’s the point? You haven’t got any not-friends to be not-friends with
@Tore: Okay. I do need it however.
@ r-a-y: Actually… maybe I wasn’t using the latest. I see the 1.5 says it includes fixes for BP1.2. Not sure when I last installed the Welcome Pack. Latest release was on Nov 24.
Also… looking at the code… it looks quite simple. And I’m thinking… off the top of my head… at first glance… that I may simply be able to modify the SQL query on line 98 to select everyone rather than everyone within the $friend array. Hmm. I’ll report back later
Hey Paul. Thanks for weighing in.
Yes… I wonder about that as well. If we should all be friends of not. The specific case here is that with this community, we are all friends in real life and we all know each other in real life. And it’s a very important community. We are a volunteer organization that falls under the umbrella of the Provincial Emergency Management Office. So it may make sense for us to all be “connected”.
That said, BuddyPress already shows you activity from everyone and already show you all members in the membership directory. So that’s great. And having specific “friends” (as opposed to just everyone) adds another layer to the social context which could be useful. My issue mainly is that I cannot send group invites to non-friends. So we have committees which need to have certain members in them… and I can’t invite them because we’re not friends.
But maybe that’s just an education issue. We are only in “test drive” mode right now. When we officially launch and I sign everyone up… I will need to do some education on how to add friends, make groups, join groups, etc. Especially with this group… since many are not what you would call “computer savvy”. LOL.
